David Redmon
Research project
LOST AND FOUND: From New York City to the Mediterranean coast – projet en collaboration avec le Centre Norbert Elias (EHESS/AMU/CNRS/Univ. Avignon)
Project summary
LOST AND FOUND explores a Mediterranean connection of 55,000 videos (VHS and DVD) that a New York City based Korean-American immigrant, Mr Yongman Kim, donated from his Lower East Side video store (Kim’s Video) to Salemi, a small town in Sicily. Shorty after arriving in Sicily, the video collection disappeared due to Mafia infiltration. My project, LOST AND FOUND, is an epic ethnographic journey seeking to retrace the journey of the video collection to the Mediterranean town, locate and find this lost collection, demonstrate how the Mafia made it disappear in the Mediterranean, and then rebuild a replica of the Kim’s Video store in the Panier of Marseille – a vibrant Mediterranean neighborhood. I have started documenting this entire journey as an ethnographic film. I have chosen Marseille as the location to rebuild a replica of the Kim’s Video store due to its resemblance to the Lower East Side in NYC, the presence of the innovative Norbert Elias Center (EHESS/the Fabrique, Marseille), and the community’s interest in culture and the arts (video, cinema, poetry, film festivals, music). Finally, I have managed to secure a contract with an owner of a 110 square meter building in the Panier neighborhood of Marseille where I will rebuild the replica video store, film the rebuilding of it, invite former workers to visit it (while also filming it as an ethnographic documentary), and then create a fiction movie set inside the store (and the Panier) with the owner Mr Kim and the former employees playing themselves. The process of making and shooting this fiction movie will be also be ethnographically filmed as documentary in a self-reflexive manner. This new adventure of merging the social sciences, ethnographic film and fiction will be the exciting culmination of the Kim’s Video project LOST AND FOUND, and I envision the Norbert Elias Center (EHESS/the Fabrique) playing a crucial role for expert advice and also generously offering the resources and location to open up a novel space for research and knowledge creation in the social sciences.
